Sunday, March 20, 2016

Some thoughts on Modi and his team

BJP has recently rightly kicked out from the party panel, the likes of Varun Gandhi, Shatrughan Sinha, Vinod Khanna, SS Alhuwalia, Kirti Azad, and Dushyant Singh.

Still, his team, which includes several economists with investment and multilateral banking backgrounds, seems to be attempting to push certain items which will favour international financial institutions at the cost of the Indian public. Subramaniam Swamy has alluded to this as well.

The taxing of Employer's Provident fund, as introduced in the Union Budget, 2016-17, was rolled back after Modi's intervention. Now again, the government has slashed interest rates of PPF, Kisan Vikas Patra, and NSC. Government has also introduced a 1% Excise Duty on gold jewellery which is also being rolled back amidst strike from jewelers.

When Modi has given clear directions to his team, why do they keep surreptitiously trying this repeated Chidambaram-esque tinkering? Modi does intervene once in a while, but he surely does not have the financial sophistication to keep track of every such move.

Indians like saving and gold. We do not need international financial institutions to come in here and force us into their crappy pension funds.

Major overhaul is needed within the Finance Ministry as they seem not to be in sync with the people's mandate.